TOPIC: Mount hd with debian

i have some files i want to back up onto cd, but for some reason, my debian OS doesn't see the partions i have on my machine. i have one harddrive, partitioned into three. How do i get the distro to see the other partitions.

First controller, first position: SDA
First controller, second position: SDB
[..]

b) The partition position, this is attached next to the hard drive and is as follows:
Primary partitions:
First: 1, Second: 2, Third: 3, Fourth: 4

Logical partitions:
First: 5, Second 6, Third 7, [...]

I.e. the first logical partition of an IDE hard disk as a primary master would be "hda5".

You can check the partitions of a hard drive and their position via the fdisk or cfdisk commands.

c) The partition type. A list of all partition types is included in the man page of mount ("man mount"). In many cases it is not necessary to define the partition type, but not always. You can define it with the "-t" switch of mount, i.e. to mount a NTFS filesystem that lays on the first logical partition of an IDE hard disk as a primary master, you could type: